Status Updates From The House of the Dead/Poor ...

"Apart from the fact that in the warmth, in the brilliant sunshine, when, in all your soul, in all your being, you feel nature with infinite force springing into life again around you, prison doors, guards, and bondage are are harder to bear than ever"
"They eat and drink what they find, what God sends them, and at night they fall asleep peacefully under God's eye in the forest, or the fields, troubling little"

THIS WAS SOME OF THE WORST READING YET- I hope we don't come across this again later because my goodness... horrible.

"Someone will say perhaps that the convict is a wicked man and does not deserve kindness; but surely there is no need to double the sufferings of one who is already stricken by the hand of God!"

"Humanity, kindness, brotherly sympathy are sometimes of more use to the patients than any medicine."

"If the Lord God is there and there's money, I shall be alright everywhere"

"One saw signs of something like friendship. I may mention in parenthesis that there was scarcely a trace of friendly feeling among the convicts- I don't mean general friendliness, that was quite out of the question, I mean the personal affection of one convict for another"

"I remember it was positively pleasant to me to think, as though priding myself on my suffering, that there was only one creature in the world who loved me, who was devoted to me, who was my friend, my one friend- my faithful dog Sharik"
"All one could see in her was an infinite kindliness, and irresistible desire to please one, to comfort one, to do something nice for one. All that could be read in her gentle eyes"

WILD: between brotherly love and suicide attempts I have no idea how to feel.

"But in spite of the unmistakable courage with which he endured his punishment, there was also a deep melancholy in his heart, which he tried to conceal from all. [He wept, and I heard him cry]: Lord, do not forsake me! Lord, give me strength!"

"The mere ache of his own heart will kill him by its torments sooner than any punishment"

"Nothing harder than to win people's confidence and to gain their love"

"One would sometimes, through a chink in the fence, take a peep into God's world to try and see something"

"I doubt whether one of the convicts ever inwardly admitted his lawlessness"

"Besides the loss of freedom, besides the force labor, there is another torture in prison life, almost more terrible than any other: compulsory life is common"

Finished Poor Folk (whoa) and now going backwards to House of the Dead.

I forgot just how much I loved Dostoevsky's style...